Page 3 of Sherwood
“Don’t—”
She was pulling her belt tight now and buttoning up her jacket. The front door still hung open behind her, and I had the abrupt awareness that anyone could have seen what we’d just done. My parents were gone for the day, and the front door was sheltered from the road, but it was still a dizzying realization, and I didn’t know whether it was disorienting orterrifyingthat we’d been so caught up in the moment that she’d fucked me in front of an open door.
I was still on my knees when she finished dressing. Something unreadable passed over her face as she looked at me, and then she turned away.
“Lox,” I begged, but I still didn’t get off my knees.
Not that it mattered.
She left anyway.
* * *
FIVE YEARS LATER
Lox came back to Sherwood on a Thursday—the same Thursday that I knelt on a polished concrete floor and kissed the hand-stitched toe box of Rafe de Lacy’s shoe.
I suppose it wouldn’t have made a difference if I’d known she was back. It had been five years, after all, and she’d been the one to leave Sherwood in the first place. And I was many, many things—young, submissive, obsessive—but the one thing I’d never been, not even as a smitten teenage girl, was foolish. And I had no interest in chasing heartbreak with humiliation.
No thief was good enough to steal the same heart twice.
Or at least so I thought.
ChapterOne
MARIAN
PRESENT DAY
I knewfrom the moment he walked in that he was a wolf.
The red-hued lights of the club cast his face mostly in shadow, but I saw enough to sketch a suggestion of his features: a bladed nose, a firm mouth with a certain sharpness to its shape. Heavy-lidded eyes which seemed to take in everything at once, and dark stubble covering the pale cut of his jaw and hollows of his cheeks.
He had the suit, shoes, and watch of a wealthy man; he had the stride and bearing of a powerful one. But it was the sleepless smudges under his eyes that snared me for real, because with them, he looked halfway to unraveling. He looked haunted and wild.
He looked like a lean winter wolf, ready to devour anything just to ease the hunger inside.
Rafe de Lacy, the bartender told me. A guest member at The Knot, here the last four nights. Visiting from Seattle for some EPA survey thing.
I supposed that I wasn’t surprised to have someone new here in Sherwood. Even though it was in the middle of Olympic nowhere, it was the only decent-sized town along this side of the national forest, and where most people ended up staying if they had business or pleasure in these parts. But I was surprised that he washere, spending his evenings at The Knot when surely Seattle had a more varied buffet for the seasoned kinkster. When surely it would be easier to wait until he was back home and on his own territory to slake his kinky thirst.
I wondered if he’d be in Sherwood for long…although I wasn’t sure if that information mattered or not. I’d only just scraped together the courage to come to the club tonight—and eventhathad taken five years—and as soon as I’d arrived, I’d known I’d made a mistake in coming.
I wasn’t ready yet. Maybe I’d never be ready.
Maybe Lox had broken something inside me that would never be fixed.
But when the wolf turned and fixed me with eyes such a pale blue that they hardly seemed real, being broken suddenly stopped mattering. Abruptly, nothing mattered at all—not my company’s eternal uphill climb, not the grief from my parents’ deaths, not the jagged hole Lox had made when she left Sherwood and took my naive, teenage heart with her.
The only things that mattered were those eyes, those lips. That hunger.
Music slid through the room as the wolf and I stared at each other; distantly, I heard the cries of someone getting spanked in a corner somewhere. Rafe de Lacy tilted his head the smallest amount, looking more like a wolf than ever as he took in the noise around him, but his gaze stayed on me. His hooded eyes narrowed for a moment before he seemed to come to some kind of decision. He turned and walked away, breaking our connection and sending icy disappointment crashing through me.
I took in a steadying breath, reminding myself that I didn’t care about some strange dominant I’d never met before. I didn’t care if he was interested in me or not. I hadn’t wanted to come tonight anyway, and I definitely wasn’t ready to try this kink thing for real, not without Lox. And I—
The wolf paused his stride and looked back over his shoulder at me. He canted his head toward a private room in an unmistakable invitation.
You coming or not?the gesture asked.
